Communication, as a fundamental part of your daily work and private life, should be integrated into your desktop environment. This integration should transparently handle all the different protocols available to chat, speak or video-conference with your friends and coworkers.

Decibel wants to provide such a framework for real-time communication. It is meant to integrate traditional phone services with VoIP and instant messaging. By providing a component based service architecture, Decibel is meant to make it easy for developers to have their applications offer advanced communication and collaboration features which will allow the user to integrate this technology into their workflows.